Baseball continues to bond Gomes brothers

Thursday

Jun 19, 2014 at 4:18 PM

HEALDSBURG, Calif. — It’s shortly after 5 p.m. on a sweaty Wednesday in northern California, and Joey Gomes — older brother to Jonny — is out helping prep the field at Recreation Park alongside his players.

By TIM BRITTON

HEALDSBURG, Calif. — It’s shortly after 5 p.m. on a sweaty Wednesday in northern California, and Joey Gomes — older brother to Jonny — is out helping prep the field at Recreation Park alongside his players.

Gomes is the general manager and head coach of the Healdsburg Prune Packers of the Golden State Collegiate Baseball League, a kind of upstart California version of the Cape League in its third year of existence. About 100 spectators, many of them kids who walk to the park in this portion of wine country, were there Wednesday to see his team drop a 5-2 decision to the Sonoma County Chili Gods.

Gomes is here because, three years after hanging up his spikes from independent ball, he can’t leave the game of baseball. He is Jonny Gomes’ brother after all.

You may question the Gomes’ baseball philosophy and its emphasis on the clubhouse. You may question Jonny’s pitch selection, or how much he should play against right-handers, or his routes to balls in left field.

You can never question the passion he and his brother have always shown toward the game of baseball — the game that bonded them during their tumultuous childhood, the game upon which they’ve left their imprint in northern California.

“Baseball was the glue,” Joey Gomes said of his relationship with his brother. The travails of their teenage years have been well-documented. There was a car crash that killed Jonny’s best friend. There were nights spent without a home. There were mistakes made by both brothers.

There was always baseball.

Those trials, Joey Gomes said, only served as “motivation to change this chain of events in our life.”

“Baseball was an outlet for that,” he continued. “Quite literally, when we would get on a baseball field, my brother and I viewed it as, there’s no more socioeconomic advantage in life. The minute you cross that [line], you’ve got to deal with me. I don’t have to deal with the school you go to or the clothes you’re wearing.”

Joey was always the model for Jonny. A year older, Joey went through the experiences of life and baseball a touch before his younger brother, and he was always there as a support system.

“He totally paved the way for me for everything this game has brought me, and everything that I didn’t know this game could bring me,” Jonny Gomes said. “He played on all the summer leagues, he traveled a long way. He was the first one in the whole family to get a college scholarship and to go to college.”

“I didn’t think I was paving any ways,” said Joey Gomes. “The home runs that he would hit, that’s all him. If there was anything you would want to pin on me, he probably just saw the way I played and said, ‘Well, I should probably run hard like that. I should probably show up every day like that.’ But he did it; he did it to the nth degree.”

The way both Gomes brothers play the game has never been negotiable.

“At a young age, we honestly thought, ‘How could you not play that hard?’” Joey Gomes said. “It was better than math. It was better than anything. ... There were a few times in Little League that we had the game taken away from us because of events out of our control. So you created this ideology inside of a grade schooler’s head that you don’t know when your last game is going to be. So you just left it all out there.”

Remarkably, the fierce intensity and the relentlessness that defines their style of play didn’t leak over into their own relationship. The two were both stars growing up in Petaluma, but their competitiveness was always focused on an external opponent, and never each other.

Joey mentions the batting cage located in a barn that the two hit at in high school, the one where they each tried their hardest to knock down the wall with line drives.

“This would probably be a good metaphor for how the relationship was,” Joey Gomes said. “It wasn’t me versus him; it was who could knock the wall down. We were competing against the wall. And the wall came down.”

Who struck the final blow against the wall? Joey doesn’t remember; the wall’s ultimate demise was from attrition, from day after day of absorbing Gomes family line drives.

“It was probably the healthiest competition you could have,” said Jonny Gomes. “He was really pulling for me, and I was really pulling for him. It wasn’t who could hit the ball farther or who can get on more.”

“We solely used each other as motivation to get better,” Joey Gomes said. “It’s not tough to believe; it’s literally what happened. Otherwise, we would have killed each other.”

The two got to play briefly together in the Tampa Bay organization, for Bakersfield of the California League, in 2002. It only lasted a few weeks, but Joey Gomes remembers hearing them introduced back-to-back in the batting order, and “you kind of look at him and it’s like, that’s so cool.”

Their careers have taken them different places, but they share the requited pride of being from Petaluma. Jonny is a favorite son, the only man from Casa Grande High School to reach the major leagues. Joey is the coach come home, who helps tutor players from Little League to college in the fine arts of baseball.

“What he’s doing now, it’s truly his calling,” Jonny Gomes said. “He’ll talk to me on the phone for like an hour about a 6-year-old’s swing. He’s losing sleep trying to get this kid better. His coaching is second to none.”

“Anything that’s worth your time in life should also be worth your effort, or why are you doing it?” said Joey Gomes. “It’s not about what I know; it’s how much I care. That’s the magic.”

The two still talk baseball — “he’s probably my best resource that I have,” Jonny Gomes said — with a focus perhaps not surprisingly on the mental side of things more than the mechanical. The expectation is they’ll get to spend some time together this weekend, though on Wednesday night at least, Joey wasn’t sure of that. So he grabs a reporter’s recorder and lets it be known.

“I’m waiting for you to still call me, you [expletive]. I don’t want to make it ‘Bring Your Brother to Work Day.’ Give me the invite.”